“Very well, then, if you insist. But I insist that the Caucasian race has many subdivisions. An Arab is a Caucasian; so is a Hindoo; but if you marry a woman of Arabic or Hindoo blood and have children by her, your offspring will be Eurasians. Tamea is a half-breed brown white. And she’s not very brown, either—sort of old ivory. She’d pass for a white girl anywhere. People who do not know her blood will say, ‘Isn’t she a marvelous brunette type of beauty!’”
“Well?”
“If she bore you sons, how would you feel if they should grow up to be great, hearty, brown fellows, unmistakably Polynesian, with prehensile great toes, an aversion to work, a penchant for white vices? You cannot dodge the Mendelian law, my boy. Like begets like, but in a union of opposites we get throwbacks. Breed a black rabbit to a white one and you will get piebald rabbits. Breed these latter to a white rabbit, and continue to breed the offspring of succeeding unions to other white rabbits until you have bred all the black out of them. About the time you think you have beaten the Mendelian law, the pure white descendant of a black and white union, a hundred generations removed, will present you with a litter of pure black rabbits! You’re not going to run the risk of mongrelizing the species, are you?”
“No, I do not think I am, Mel.”
“Do you know you are not?”
“No.”
“I thought so.” Mellenger rose, walked to Dan and thrust the ruddy end of his cigar in the latter’s face. “You’re in love with Tamea already, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know, Mel. Something has happened. It happened tonight. You saw it happen. It never happened to me before. Good Lord, Mel, old man, my head has been in a whirl ever since.”
“That isn’t love. It’s infatuation. I’ve been through it. I know. It’s a wonderful madness. It’s what’s wrong with the world today. It’s at the root of the divorce problem. Infatuation. And the fools think it is love.
“Nothing divine about it, nothing spiritual; its victims take no thought of the qualifications so essential to successful marriage—an even temper, generosity, unselfishness, tenderness, physical fitness, the absence of mental and physical repulsiveness.